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A Stroke of Luck (1936)

Reino (Toivo Palomurto) is a high-level engineer at a shipyard, laid off along with many of the workers as the recession bites. His girlfriend Maire (Ester Toivonen) is sure they’ll muddle through, but her father, the shipyard owner Mr Rauta (Yrjö Tuominen) has other ideas, and is determined to find a more suitable suitor for his daughter. Mistakenly believing that Reino has stolen ten thousand marks, Rauta forbids Maire from seeing him, although all’s well that ends well after she’s fought off the cad Korppi (Jorma Nortimo) and the scheming shopkeeper Nixman (Kaarlo Kartio).

Erkki Karu planned on directing this remake of the Swedish Uppsagd (1934, Laid Off) after completing the previous year’s TheHouse at Roinila, collaborating on the script with Ensio Rislakki, a journalist and satirist known for wordplay and literary parodies. But Karu’s demise dumped the project unceremoniously on Glory Leppänen, a 35-year-old theatre director whose film experience was limited to acting roles in a couple of silent movies.

Inadvertently becoming Finland’s first female film director, Leppänen delivers Onnenpotku (A Stroke of Luck) on the cusp between silent and sound. A dozen plot points are conveyed by close-ups on letters, notes and posters, as if she misses the days of intertitles, and in what is either a provocative staging decision or a fault in the audio, a whole dance sequence without any accompanying soundtrack. It is as if she doesn’t trust audio to convey anything of worth, causing several sequences to unfold as mime. Most notably, the rude mechanical Jussi (Aku Korhonen) accidentally robs the nervous shopkeeper Nixman, when the latter mistakes his cigarette case for a gun, a scene played entirely silently, when the words “Oh, it’s only a cigarette case” might have helped dispel the misunderstanding.

In a reversal of the original Swedish version, the Finnish title “A Stroke of Luck” emphasises the hero’s escape from straitened circumstances, rather than his unemployment. The film certainly caught the spirit of its time, finding a Recession-era audience ready to sympathise with its downtrodden workers making the best of a bad situation. Employers and capitalists are presented as snarling baddies, with both Korppi and Nixman sporting ridiculous caterpillar moustaches. If anything, Leppänen is let down by her leads, both of whom had played similar roles before, but who seem ill at ease with performing as a couple already in a relationship. When they kiss, it looks like Palomurto is trying to eat Toivonen’s chin. Meanwhile, Yrjö Tuominen is creepily hands-on in his dealings with his on-screen daughter, constantly pawing at the former Miss Finland under the guise of delivering paternal advice.

Toivonen seemed to spend much of her acting career similarly put-upon. She was still only 22 at the time she appeared in this, her third feature film, catapulted into the limelight by her beauty-queen status. That, in itself, carried a heavy burden, forcing her into a role as an example of pure Finnish womanhood, intended to demonstrate to overseas immigration bureaus that Finns were Europeans, not as had been argued in some quarters, Asians. Pushed into an acting career she for which she was ill-prepared, she would marry and retire at the end of her twenties, later writing in her memoirs of her perpetual annoyance with directors, critics and cinema-goers who were unable to see past her looks.

But many workers in cinema’s early days were similarly finding their feet by trial and error and would not necessarily stick around – Glory Leppänen would return to a successful career in theatre; Toivo Palomurto would retire behind the camera to become a film composer, and Jalo Kalima, who played “Man in Coffee Shop”, would go back to being the Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Helsinki.